Making the future of technology exciting!

In late 2014, VMware changed their default stance on the use of TPS to share memory between Virtual Machines as a consequence of a low risk security threat. Given that VMware needed to remain squeaky clean on security compliance, they duly changed the out of the box way TPS worked forever which for some customers meant that memory budgets and allocations that were architected based upon the old implementation needed to be reconsidered. Views on whether you should or shouldn’t change the default behaviour of VMware to revert back to what is an extremely efficient way of sharing memory are discussions that need to be had with corporate security officers but for homelabs, where YOU wear the security hat (amongst many others), why not benefit from reclaiming some much needed RAM.

Reasons to consider whether or not to do this can be found on numerous other blog posts, but as a quick and dirty guide, here are the steps you need to follow to restore the original mechanism:

On each host within your cluster, through the Web Client, click on Manage –> Settings –> Advanced System Settings. Locate Mem.ShareForceSalting and change the default value of 2 to 0 (zero)

vMotion the workloads off or power them off and on again for the change to take effect!

To demonstrate the benefits of reverting TPS to the legacy way, on my 3 node VSAN cluster with 48GB of RAM, here are the memory stats before and after:

HOST1:

HOST2:

HOST3:

As you can see from the PSHARE/MB common: saving column, in total across all three hosts, with a little bit of maths, this is a memory reclamation of over 10GB which is just short of a quarter of the RAM available to my entire Cluster. Why not try it and see what effect it has, at least on your homelab!